Latest / Overwhelmed Working Woman: Boost Productivity, Master Time Management, Overcome Overwhelm & Stop People Pleasing / #302| Why Doing the Urgent Thing First Keeps Your Most Important Project Stuck for Months, and the Eisenhower Matrix Productivity Fix
Transcript
- 0:00Michelle Gauthier: When you listen today, you'll learn why doing the urgent thing first actually keeps your most important project stuck for months, and how to fix it using the Eisenhower productivity matrix.
- 0:11Michelle Gauthier: You're listening to Overwhelmed Working Woman, the podcast that helps you be more calm and more productive by doing less.
- 0:23Michelle Gauthier: I'm your host, Michelle Gauthier, a former Overwhelmed Working Woman and current life coach.
- 0:28Michelle Gauthier: On this show, we unpack the stress and pressure that today's Working Woman experiences.
- 0:33Michelle Gauthier: And in each episode, you'll get a strategy to bring more calm, ease, and relaxation to your life.
- 0:40Michelle Gauthier: Hey friend, thanks for joining today.
- 0:45Michelle Gauthier: When you listen today, you'll learn why urgent stuff always wins, even when you know it's not that important.
- 0:50Michelle Gauthier: The four boxes, aka the Eisenhower Matrix, that will help you sort your whole list in about two minutes.
- 0:57Michelle Gauthier: And the one move that finally gets your important project off next week's list and onto this week's list.
- 1:03Michelle Gauthier: I'll tell you, I was just talking to a client about this last week, and I have my own example, something that I'm working on, and it has been on my list, and I haven't picked it up in about three weeks.
- 1:14Michelle Gauthier: My project is I'm writing a book, and the book is a journal.
- 1:18Michelle Gauthier: It's going to be a hardback journal like you'd buy on Amazon or at a bookstore, and it's going to teach you how to go from feeling overwhelmed to calm.
- 1:28Michelle Gauthier: So it's going to be a guided journal.
- 1:30Michelle Gauthier: This is very high on my priority list.
- 1:33Michelle Gauthier: It's something that I'm really excited about doing, but it's not urgent.
- 1:37Michelle Gauthier: I could really do it now, or I could do it in January, or I could do it next summer.
- 1:43Michelle Gauthier: There's no deadline to it.
- 1:44Michelle Gauthier: And so that just keeps getting put on the back burner week after week.
- 1:49Michelle Gauthier: In episode 295, I talked about the mere urgency effect, which essentially found that people pick the urgent task over the important one, even when the important one pays off more, just because the urgent one has a deadline.
- 2:04Michelle Gauthier: And I feel like that makes a lot of sense.
- 2:05Michelle Gauthier: It's human nature.
- 2:06Michelle Gauthier: Because here's the thing about, in my case, writing this journal or whatever your version of this is, nobody's emailing me asking me how it's going, and nobody's waiting on that draft.
- 2:18Michelle Gauthier: So other things get my attention more urgently than that does.
- 2:23Michelle Gauthier: And this is where the Eisenhower matrix comes in.
- 2:25Michelle Gauthier: President Eisenhower said it back in 1954.
- 2:28Michelle Gauthier: He was quoting a college president.
- 2:30Michelle Gauthier: He said, I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important.
- 2:34Michelle Gauthier: And the urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.
- 2:38Michelle Gauthier: And that whole idea became the Eisenhower matrix, and Stephen Covey made it famous.
- 2:43Michelle Gauthier: Remember that Stephen Covey planners?
- 2:45Michelle Gauthier: I loved those.
- 2:46Michelle Gauthier: Okay, I just had to pause and look that up and make sure that Stephen Covey was the Franklin Covey planner guy.
- 2:52Michelle Gauthier: And yes, he is.
- 2:52Michelle Gauthier: Okay, I feel better now.
- 2:54Michelle Gauthier: Thanks for going down that rabbit hole with me, but I loved those planners.
- 2:57Michelle Gauthier: So here is how to make an Eisenhower matrix for yourself.
- 3:02Michelle Gauthier: It's super simple.
- 3:04Michelle Gauthier: Draw a square and then split the square in half, top to bottom, and split the square in half right to left.
- 3:09Michelle Gauthier: So now you've got four boxes.
- 3:11Michelle Gauthier: Let's talk about the categories.
- 3:13Michelle Gauthier: The first box, the top left box, is urgent and important.
- 3:16Michelle Gauthier: That's, for example, your boss needs numbers from you by noon.
- 3:20Michelle Gauthier: So it's something that is important and it's happening and it has a deadline, and that deadline is soon.
- 3:25Michelle Gauthier: The second box is important but not urgent.
- 3:28Michelle Gauthier: This is your long-term project, or in my case, writing this journal.
- 3:33Michelle Gauthier: And what you want to do with things in that box is schedule them.
- 3:36Michelle Gauthier: Third box is urgent but not important.
- 3:39Michelle Gauthier: This is like, hey, I've got a quick question for you that you need to answer via email or the form that you need to fill out for your kids' field trip tomorrow.
- 3:47Michelle Gauthier: Most of what lands on here is someone else's urgent, not necessarily yours.
- 3:52Michelle Gauthier: For these, I really recommend either delegating it to someone else or doing B minus work.
- 3:58Michelle Gauthier: Urgent but not important is a great spot to do B minus work.
- 4:02Michelle Gauthier: And then the last is not urgent and not important.
- 4:06Michelle Gauthier: And what I recommend for that box is just deleting it.
- 4:10Michelle Gauthier: If you want to keep it at the bottom of your to-do list just for fun, you can.
- 4:14Michelle Gauthier: But you know those things that are on your list that you never actually get to, like cleaning out that one drawer, or one I always have in my mind is I have all these photo books from when I was growing up.
- 4:23Michelle Gauthier: My mom was super diligent about putting these together.
- 4:26Michelle Gauthier: And I want to take them all apart and digitize the photos.
- 4:29Michelle Gauthier: It's a perfect example of it's not urgent and it's not that important because I have them in a different form.
- 4:33Michelle Gauthier: And basically I'm just never going to get to them.
- 4:35Michelle Gauthier: So the first time you do this, make this Eisenhower matrix, put your four boxes, take your to-do list and put things in those four boxes.
- 4:42Michelle Gauthier: It'll take a few minutes first time.
- 4:44Michelle Gauthier: But after that, after you get used to it, it'll just gonna take like two minutes.
- 4:48Michelle Gauthier: Be sure that you schedule box two items on your calendar first.
- 4:53Michelle Gauthier: Box two is important, not urgent.
- 4:55Michelle Gauthier: The journal in my example.
- 4:57Michelle Gauthier: I really don't have a calendar item for working on the journal, so I have to make one myself and then I have to treat it like it's an appointment with a client that I would not miss.
- 5:06Michelle Gauthier: So put that appointment on your calendar, make it a cannot miss appointment in one of your best hours of the day and spend time making progress on that.
- 5:15Michelle Gauthier: In summary, urgent is always louder than important.
- 5:18Michelle Gauthier: So stop waiting for a quiet week before you get to the important stuff and give your important project the good spot on your calendar.
- 5:26Michelle Gauthier: Maybe it's two 30-minute appointments this week.
- 5:29Michelle Gauthier: Even one hour of progress would be much more than zero.
- 5:32Michelle Gauthier: If you have a project or some important thing that you keep pushing off to the side but you know it matters, I'd love to help you finally make room for doing that.
- 5:42Michelle Gauthier: I have a spot right now for a one-on-one coaching client.
- 5:46Michelle Gauthier: So if you want to set up a free discovery session with me, the link is in the show notes and we'll look at what's taking up your week and find space for the thing that you actually want time to investigate.
- 5:57Michelle Gauthier: Have a great week.
- 5:59Michelle Gauthier: Thank you for listening to the Overwhelmed Working Woman podcast.
- 6:06Michelle Gauthier: If you want to learn more about my work, head over to my website at MichelleGauthier.com.
- 6:12Michelle Gauthier: See you next week.